The invention relates generally to activation of software products in applications including on-line or Internet banking. On-line or Internet banking has become increasingly popular and has greatly simplified how customers conduct banking and financial transactions and how they manage their finances. On-line banking allows bank customers to manage and track various financial applications such as deposits, withdraws, loan amounts, credit card amounts, and other financial matters at the user's convenience and at various locations and at various times. The popularity of on-line banking is evident by estimates that more than 50 million households will conduct banking transactions on-line by the year 2010.
One known on-line banking system is implemented using an on-line banking program that executes on an on-line banking or production server (generally referred to as a production server), which may be managed by a third party host on behalf of a financial institution such as a bank, savings and loan, credit union, credit card company, mortgage company or loan company (generally referred to as financial institution). A production server may include pages or files for serving one or multiple financial institutions and may include or be comprised of one or multiple servers (generally referred to as a production server). A server of the financial institution is coupled to the production server such that data relating to customer accounts is provided to the production server on the back-end of the system, and this data is processed and managed by an on-line banking software product on the production server. During use, a customer may use a web browser and a customer computer on the front-end of the system to access his or her account on the production server via a network using the on-line banking product. One example of a third party host that provides production servers and these types of on-line banking services to financial institutions and their customers is Digital Insight, a unit of Intuit Inc, Mountain View, Calif.
Sometimes, a software product or “add on” software product (generally referred to as a software product) is offered by the third party host and may be activated such that it can be utilized with or supplement the on-line banking product that is used for on-line banking or other on-line financial transactions. Examples of such software products include personal finance, accounting and tax preparation software products that are used by the customer to track and manage personal and business finance, accounting and tax matters. Other examples of such software products include software products that are used for particular tasks such as check imaging, bill payment, on-line statements and configuring or updating of Internet banking software products. Such software products may provide enhanced services and capabilities thus resulting in higher customer satisfaction, customer retention, increased use of the site by the customer, and increased bank deposits.
Each financial institution may select the software products that are to be activated such that they can be accessed by their respective customers, e.g., through the on-line banking site that is managed by the third party host. Thus, certain financial institutions may offer selected software products, whereas others may not even if these financial institutions are managed by the same host. Financial institutions that activate software products for their on-line banking customers may be charged a fee by the third party host. The fee may, for example, be based on the number of on-line banking customers that utilize the software product, usage during a specific time frame, a number of transactions, etc.
Configuring or enabling software products or add-on software products, however, can be quite cumbersome and time consuming. Currently, software products are manually activated by a programmer or manager of the third party host, examples of which include Digital Insight and website hosting companies. More specifically, a technical support person may receive a request from the financial institution to enable a particular software product or add-on, and in response, manually edit configuration files such that changes to the production server allow a customer who accesses the production sever to also access the newly activated software product as a result of manual configuration. Such manual configurations may involve ensuring that the software product is activated and accessible to a customer using a single sign-on (SSO) who logs onto his or her account through the on-line banking product using single sign-on.
During certain known activation procedures, a project manager or technical support person of a third party host is assigned to each financial institution to configure the software products requested by each financial institution and to respond to questions or troubleshoot questions from the financial institutions to address issues that arise during deployment of the software products. For example, a third party host may dedicate multiple technical support people to manage troubleshooting issues via telephone, e-mail and secure chat. Such procedures involve substantial human resources, time, and hand-holding of the financial institution as software product deployment issues are resolved. Further, the results that are achieved through the use of project managers and technical support people may not be consistent since different people may approach the same or similar problems in different ways, and these different approaches may lead to different or less effective results. These inconsistencies may also result in more time and effort being dedicated to activating a software product. Further, these inconsistencies, technical difficulties and manual processes may result in lower quality results and difficulties with activation as a result of higher error rates. These issues and shortcomings become increasingly important as on-line banking becomes increasingly popular.